Today is a huge day for me, it marks the release of my first game ever to go up for sale directly to players. You can go to the rymdkapsel website and get the game, right now.

I started working on this just over a year ago, right after coming back from GDC. I was working on some other project at the time, but figured I’d take a week of to try and hash out this idea I had about a building a space station. The game quickly turned into something different than I had imagined, and I put another week into it to see where it would go. Those two weeks turned into three, and then into a month and then some.

I released a small teaser trailer in early july, and with that I somehow got in contact with Sony. I took a few weeks off for summer vacation and then got to work porting the game to C# and their platform. In the process I expanded and polished every little corner of the game quite a bit.

Then came the, Independent Games Festival which awarded me with an Honorable Mention in the design category. It’s still absolutely huge to me to get that kind of recognition from my peers.

Now, here we are, months of bug fixing and polishing later with a game that is out on its first platform of many to come. I’ve spent the past few days cleaning up the iOS and Android versions in preparation of testing, and those will be out in two months or so.

Very nice game! I think that you will find huge success if you expand to the Microsoft app store. Its download numbers are increasing with the release of the Surface Pro 3, and there is no doubt that rymdkapsel would be accepted and loved by many!

Wow! What an awesome game really, it mixes genres in a perfect way that it makes total sense, the slow pace reminds me of 2001: a space odissey(which I love) with realtimestrategy great!, it’s exiting to try and break new ground… Or space really… There is no ground anywhere in this game, and I see you are always updating your masterpiece, and it would be really awesome if you could add a map randomizer or map creator to share with the community, but that doesn’t change the fact that I LOVE your game so much it’s the first game I have bought on my mobile, and probably will be the only one, and just felt the urge to write a comment on your game because I really want to see this grow:) keep your creativity up! Haha

Hi Martin, I just beat all 3 challenges in Rymdkapsel. Amazing game! Are you planning any new content for it? If so, are you thinking about adding an easy mode? A mode that would let players zone out for longer and build bigger cities without worrying too much about extreme alien onslaught until maybe even the 40th or 50th wave? 🙂 Thanks for the amazing game.

Per usual this blog is woefully underposted, most of the action is over on twitter. But, I do have something to treat you to. I spent the past weekend camped out in the Mojang offices up in Stockholm, making a game for charity in the form of Humble Bundle in three days.

hey Martin, thanks for Tektonik! i really enjoyed watching you build it from scratch. would you consider releasing the source code of the project? it would be a very educational for me and I guess for a lot of people. cheers

Me and my friend Niklas (who also happens to be making the music for rymdkapsel) have built the thing pictured above. It’s a four player arcade machine, it’s been to a bunch of events so far, perhaps most notably at No More Sweden (the unpainted machine is on the stage that entire video).

It’s time for my quarterly blog post, this time I’ve got some neat news. rymdkapsel has found yet another platform, Playstation Mobile. This will be the platform the game premieres on once it’s ready for release, which I plan to be in early 2013.

If you’re not familiar with Playstation Mobile, or PSM for short, it’s basically the Sony equivalent to Apples App Store or Android Market Google Play.

This has been a bit of a secret for a while and it feels great to finally be able to talk about it freely. In other news I submitted the game to the Independent Games Festival, competition there is absolutely fierce so it remains to be seen how that goes!

If you want more info on me, rymdkapsel, or my other games, check out my presskit.

This is a game I’ve been working on for the past few months, it’s a game where you take command of a space station and its minions. You will have to plan your expansion and manage your resources to explore the galaxy.

It will launch on iOS, Android and Flash “soon”.

I am currently seeking a sponsorship for the Flash version, contact me for further information.

That’s interesting! The towers are set to “stick” with their current target as long as it’s in range. One interesting thing that happens when you’re trying to optimize your placements is that since all shooting is resolved simultaneously, you will “loose” shots if you place two towers so that they’re firing in sync at the same enemy. The first tower will shoot and kill the enemy so the second tower will be firing at an enemy that is already dead. There are so many tiny little choices like this, it wouldn’t be a huge deal to “fix” but I kind of like that there are little micro optimizations like that to make.

Timing and “tower AI” must be very important for success. As an illustration, I can get the escapee UP by placing a third tower. That doesn’t make much sense until you start looking at which creeper the tower decides to shoot at. A smart tower would probably always go for the kill. ..Or.. not go for the kill and always strive to “use” its entire firepower. Then you add another tower type and my eyes will go cross.

A little while ago I attended (and co-arranged) the “most swedish” game jam called No More Sweden. I was sick during the entire previous game jam I attended and spent most of my time asleep, so I really felt like getting my revenge and making a proper game this time around.

Just a few days before I had seen this amazing video of a mariachi-band serenading a beluga whale and was determined to make a game featuring one of these bands. Somehow I managed to convince my team mates that this would be a good idea and we decided on an idea after something like half an hour of discussion. Coming to a decision that fast is a first for me.

The division of work ended up in the most predictable way. I did code, Jonas did graphics and Per did the rest. We scrambled to get atleast a playable mockup and some concepts done before going home to sleep and Per scrounged the web for inspiration, reference materials and other useful things.

We also hijacked Mattias and forced him to compose some silly music for us.

Once we got the basic gameplay up and running we were confident that this would turn out nice. Then we went home and slept.

We got back around noon on Saturday and kept working well into Sunday. At 6 in the morning we decided that we were pretty much done, either way, as tired as we were no more work was going to be done. Sadly this meant that the time it would take us to go home and then back again would mean almost no sleep before the presentations, so we decided to just stay the night.

Petri and I were invited to do a talk at the Nordic Indie Game Night in Malmö this past week, we were supposed to talk about the super sexy Cobalt. Instead we went kind of overboard on an analysis of the physics in platformers. We got way more material than we could fit in the ten minutes (which we exceeded), so there may be another chance to catch an extended version of this talk at some point.

Update: Since I posted this in a bit of a hurry, I forgot to mention that the NGIN was conjured into existence by the fantastically wonderful Copenhagen Game Collective. Who, aside from making marvelous games are doing incredible things for the game making community in these parts of the world. They really are the best.